It says on Slashdot that

“Computer Shopper magazine has interviewed the UK Home Office about its relationship with the Internet Watch Foundation and discovered that the government doesn’t actually know what the IWF does, although it still plans to force UK ISPs to subscribe to the IWF’s blacklist… the IWF investigates suspected child porn websites and adds any it finds to a list that ISPs can use to block these sites; uk.gov wants ISPs to use this list; however, the IWF is not an official government organization, does not appear to have legal permission to view child pornography, and quite possibly is breaking the law by doing so.”

It appears that our Antipodean cousins have avoided this sort of bumbling incompetence, and have already banned Wikileaks. Slashdot reports Wikileaks’ response:

‘The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.’

I note with dissatisfaction An Englishman’s report that the Philip Pullman piece to which we both linked earlier has now been removed from the online version of the Times.

An Englishman has kindly reposted the article for the benefit of those who missed it; a commenter provides its missing line.

The great science-fiction writer Harry Harrison was unfortunately prone to appeasing, more or less grudgingly as circumstances required, his publishers, which resulted in some of his better novels (all of which had proper endings) being rapidly followed up with successions of sequels of, shall we say, somewhat inferior literary merit. This phenomenon is now known in some SF circles as the ‘Harrison effect’ (the apparently similar but technically quite different phenomenon of an author publishing of his own free will, at a quite amazing speed, anything whatsoever which he can persuade to carry his name being known as the ‘Asimov-of-the-Month Club’).

Though I hate to judge a thing like this before all the facts are in [Turgidson] it’s beginning to look as though Mr. Pullman is in the process of rapidly transmogrifying from a rather off-puttingly calculating writer of childrens’ books into a libertarian cause celèbre. If so, then I suggest that he deserves the ‘Named Effect or Law’ appropriate to his case.

Naïve article in The Independent about how all home secretaries turn into monsters.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has presumably not heard of the well-known saying of the first Baron Acton:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

She may not even have read what has been called ‘the best thriller ever written’: Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, in which the following uncited quotation, which might be seen by the uncharitable as more relevant to the present home secretary, appears as a preamble:

“…in the case of hippopotami, the wanton viciousness of old cows is not to be disregarded.”

[actually the title of a fine modern sequel to 1066 And All That, by Paul Manning, ISBN 0708826121, illustrated by Patrick Wright, who has closely followed the style of the original in such memorable scenes as 'Hitler enlarging his living-room' and 'Bevan going naked into the conference chamber']

A number of responses to the LPUK 1984 campaign, and the reaction to it from the MSM and from one Tom Harris, MP. Matt Davies (Woking Libertarians) condemns the ill-informed dismissal of the campaign by the MSM. Ian Parker-Joseph (LPUK Leader) corrects Harris’ ignorance of modern history. Patrick Vessey (LPUK unofficial) reflects upon the well-known saying of Ghandi:

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

PV distinguishes between Harris (ignoring) and the MSM (ridiculing). For myself I am not wholly convinced of the virtue of sending books to members of the political oligarchy, remembering as I do the story which crops up with every US President, and has probably done so since the building of the White House:

There has been a serious fire in the Library of the White House. Both books were damaged. The President is said to be personally most upset, because he had not yet finished colouring one of them in.

Already, however, they start to mistake their opponents; PV points out that

…the Party only contributed 75 copies of the book. The other 571… were either sent directly by you, or were funded by you and sent on your behalf by ourselves.

If we are to confront this enemy by sending them anything more difficult to understand than a P45, then I would suggest that by way of Christmas presents we might consider a copy each of the superb and doubtless-soon-to-be-banned Wasp by Eric Frank Russell, in which a quite immoral but far more memorable postal publicity stunt is described:

This package could have killed you.
Two packages, brought together, could kill ten million.
End this war before we end you!
Dirac Angestun Gesept*.

* ‘Sirian Freedom Party’